


earthquake

by hito_ritabi



Series: lingEr [4]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Earthquakes, M/M, village
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-22
Updated: 2014-10-22
Packaged: 2018-02-22 04:15:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2494049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hito_ritabi/pseuds/hito_ritabi





	earthquake

the land was giggling

To Cyril, this was a completely sick twisted joke. The land was giggling, bobbing up and down, riling and twisting the landscape. Hills crumbled and landslides occurred, taking with them small wooden houses from the farms. It was all to be expected, for sure, when an earthquake happened, but this one... It seemed, oddly out of the blue. The farm was inland, many miles from any mountains or volcanoes that were lively spewing out ash, gases or magma.

 

Cyril had crouched down, his arm covering Hiero, who was rolled up in a ball, holding his hood over his ducked head. They were snuggled close together out in the open, in the middle of a dirt path that led toward the village they were heading to off to the east, and up a calm rolling hill that was now violently bubbling with laughter to the southwest.

 

Hiero was groaning and screaming, as the ground shook beneath them. “It'll be all right!” Cyril shouted over the sound of liquifying stone that echoed beneath them.

 

Then, the shaking stopped. It panned out and echoed outward away from nothing. Cyril watched as it just became still, slowly, like the ripples that fade from the water's surface after a stone's been dropped in. Something had caused this quake that had come from above he figured. Surly the land was suspect to laughter of a different sort if the alteration had come from within.

 

He leaned up, putting more weight on his legs now, instead of hovering over Cyril's smaller form. Letting out a breath of air that had been caught in his lungs with the excitement, Cyril's green eyes scanned the horizon to see if anything major had happened. Aside from noisy disturbed birds flying around complaining about the disruption to their peaceful lives, everything looked calm. Hiero shifted up just in time to hear the wailing of children and people sobbing from the village, a mere fifty paces away. Standing to his feet, Cyril dusted off his white attire from the dirt, then leaned down and picked up the heavy leather sack he had swung to the ground when the convulsing had started.

 

Hiero stood up a moment later, patting the dirt off of his knees and elbows. “Not hurt?” He asked, looking up to Cyril's face with a worried look in his eye.

 

“Nah,” Cyril answered, shaking his head. “I'm good.” He adjusted the strap of the bag so it was in a better spot on his collarbone. “Let's go check out the town.”

 

Hiero looked toward it, then adjusted his much-smaller leather sack that was hidden underneath his cloak with one hand pushing the base of it up. “Will we have to bury them ourselves?”

 

Cyril shook his head, “No, the people will help.” He nodded, and started walking ahead of Hiero. He looked around at the landscape as he walked, taking in the changes to the geography- a few cracks in the land had formed, topped trees here and there, but mostly everything looked like it had bended back to where it was before as if it were on sand. That liquified nature of the earth terrified him to his bones.

 

Hiero looked behind them, up toward the hill. There was a huge gash cutting halfway up the hill, where raw cold stone and earth was exposed to the light of day. The crack cut all the way to the path, and to the other side. Anyone using the road now will have a much harder time crossing until a bridge is made.

 

“Hiero!” Cyril called to him, almost twenty feet ahead of him already. “Don't loiter behind!”

 

“Sorry!” Hiero called to him as apologetically as he could, and sprinted to catch up to his heels.


End file.
